While I don't disagree with this post in spirit, it feels tone deaf. Many very popular and well used FOSS projects rely on one or two core contributors who are volunteering their time to build something useful, fitting that work in alongside their paying work and the rest of their life. If a maintainer of a project I use has 3 hours in between their kid's baseball game and dinner one Sunday to spend working on it, I'd much rather them spend that time making the project better than on giving pro forma replies to PRs and issues that aren't valuable to the project to adhere to some sense of decorum (and, as a former maintainer, even a polite "no" to a bad idea or a disguised request for free technical consulting is time consuming).
As a tangent,
Not acknowledging contributions and the work that goes into them, whether through a quick response or a kind word, undermines our entire community. Every time that happens, it’s a “fuck you” towards a contributor. That seems fashionable if we look at the wider society—things are falling apart around us as we burn the planet and let nations get away with exploitation and murder—, but that doesn’t make it acceptable.
is kind of a wild connection to draw given the reality of many (most, I'd argue) FOSS projects. A busy single maintainer prioritizing their limited time by ignoring low effort contributions is in no way like burning the planet.
(maybe the author is implicitly thinking of very large, well resourced projects with sustaining funding and a lot of maintainers, where I think a higher standard might be fair. That's not really clear from the post, though, and I don't think it's accurate to regard those as "the community", in the same way that we don't regard Google, Amazon, etc as the entire software industry)
While I don't disagree with this post in spirit, it feels tone deaf. Many very popular and well used FOSS projects rely on one or two core contributors who are volunteering their time to build something useful, fitting that work in alongside their paying work and the rest of their life. If a maintainer of a project I use has 3 hours in between their kid's baseball game and dinner one Sunday to spend working on it, I'd much rather them spend that time making the project better than on giving pro forma replies to PRs and issues that aren't valuable to the project to adhere to some sense of decorum (and, as a former maintainer, even a polite "no" to a bad idea or a disguised request for free technical consulting is time consuming).
As a tangent,
is kind of a wild connection to draw given the reality of many (most, I'd argue) FOSS projects. A busy single maintainer prioritizing their limited time by ignoring low effort contributions is in no way like burning the planet.
(maybe the author is implicitly thinking of very large, well resourced projects with sustaining funding and a lot of maintainers, where I think a higher standard might be fair. That's not really clear from the post, though, and I don't think it's accurate to regard those as "the community", in the same way that we don't regard Google, Amazon, etc as the entire software industry)
save